Roman's Product Management Podcast

When it comes to product strategy, people often focus on templates, tools, and frameworks. While these matter, they are only a small part of what’s needed to develop a successful strategy. In this episode, I take a holistic approach and discuss product strategy from a system perspective. I consider people, processes, and principles in addition to tools, I share the strategy system I have developed and explain how you can take advantage of it.

It may not be pleasant to experience, but conflict is necessary to innovate successfully. Without competing ideas, it's virtually impossible to create great products. Unfortunately, many conflicts are handled poorly; they are hidden or result in personal attacks. In this article, I explain how you can skilfully navigate conflict and use it as a source of creativity and innovation for your product.

Developing a winning product strategy is hard. Keeping the strategy relevant and achieving product success on a continued basis is even harder. In this episode, I discuss how you can use the product lifecycle model to address this challenge. I explain how the model can help you make the right strategic choices, focus and evolve the product strategy, and proactively progress and grow the product.

The product roadmap is a popular product management tool that communicates how a product is likely to evolve. But despite its popularity, it’s not always applicable. In this podcast episode, I share three scenarios in which using a roadmap is not advisable. I explain why not using a roadmap is the right course of action, what you can do instead to plan ahead, and which steps you can take to get closer to developing a realistic, actionable roadmap.

The product strategy is probably the most important artefact in product management. But how do you come up with an effective strategy in the first place? How can you minimise the risk of offering an unsuccessful product and instead maximise the chances of achieving success? In this episode, I introduce product strategy discovery as a systematic, disciplined approach to help you develop a winning strategy for your product.

A product team is a cross-functional group whose members work together to achieve product success. Most people would agree that the person in charge of the product, a UX designer, and one or more developers should be on the team. But if stakeholders should be included, is more contentious. In this podcast episode, I discuss two types of product teams, core and extended ones. I explore the benefits and challenges of using a larger team that includes the key stakeholders, and I share practical tips to make this approach work.

The most amazing product strategy and product roadmap are ineffective if the stakeholders don’t support them. Without their buy-in, you’ll struggle to execute the strategy and find it hard to deliver the roadmap. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This podcast episode shares my tips to help you secure strong stakeholder buy-in to strategic product decisions, align people, and achieve product success together.

Outcome-based product roadmaps offer many benefits over traditional, feature-based ones including a strong focus on the value a product should create. But how can you introduce this new approach when an organisation is used to feature-based plans and stakeholders find it difficult to trust an outcome-based roadmap? To address this challenge, I introduce a four-step process in this podcast episode.

Markets, products, and technologies change at an ever-faster pace, and product strategies are in danger of becoming quickly outdated if they are not being adapted. To help you address this challenge, I discuss continuous strategizing in this podcast episode—an approach that looks at strategy as an ongoing process rather than periodical work. What's more, I offer practical advice on how you can implement continuous strategizing and ensure that your product strategy is truly adaptive.

OKRs—objectives and key results—are a popular goal-setting technique. But can and should you use OKRs on product roadmaps? What benefits does this approach offer and are there any drawbacks? These are the questions I’ll answer in this podcast episode.